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Tuesday, May 8, 2018

Skin in the game: industry funding of science

Of late, I have been the target of lot of
Twitterati innuendos about my independence as a scientist. I realise that short
of repenting at the feet of whatever God or Goddess of scientific purity that
might be nominated by the sacred college of the holy and undivided Twitterati, I will remain besmirched, sullied and rendered
utterly untrustworthy by the high priests of Twitterati scientific morality.

Whether it was Warren Buffet or William Shakespeare
who is responsible for the phrase ‘skin in the game’, matters little. It is
still understood to representan
apparent or real vested interest in some topic. In science, such interests must
be declared in any oral or written opinion in the context of any scientific
endeavour such as the delivery of a lecture, the seeking of publicly funded
research grants, the publication of scientific papers or the participation in
any advisory committee. To fail to adhere to the principle ofa declaration of interest (DoI) is to fall
short of minimal requirements of scientific integrity. A DoI can translate into
a Conflict of Interest (CoI) if the situation arises where a scientist offers
an opinion in any forum where he or she has an interest in the outcome of the
forum’s deliberations. Usually that involves the scientist being excused or
recused, whatever the correct term might be. Because there are no written laws
or guidelines that cover every eventuality, individual integrity is an absolute
expectation in science.

Some scientists and some research institutes
adopt the view that their work should not be funded by industry. Rather, they
focus all their research on public funding with no industrial ties. In so
doing, they become immune to any questioning of the provenance of their wisdom.
Other scientists adopt an entirely opposite view and are of the opinion that
engagement with industry is an essential societal role to deliver economic
growth and increase employment, in effect, to give the funding agency and the
tax payer, a return on investment. Neither
of these positions is either right or wrong. They simply represent a world
view of individuals or institutes and in that regard are no different from
other contrasting choices: vegetarianism v. meat eating; democrat v.
republican; theism and atheism; tax cuts v. social investment. A constant
difficulty for scientists who engage with industry, is that the advocates that
populate Twitter, just don’t understand the mechanics of industry involvement
in research. So for their benefit, here is a tutorial on joint academic
industry funding with apologies for the length.

Two types of industrial funding exist which
involve academic researchers. First, there is research commissioned by a single
company to solve some particular problem they need investigating. This is far
more rare an event than would popularly be believed by the Twitterati. The main reason why academics don’t like such
work is that, often, it is pure contract research and frequently involves research
questions that are marginal to their publicly funded strategy. All researchers
have such a strategy which maps out a research path they want to pursue. It
governs their choice of conferences to attend, journals to read and funding to
chase. But, for practical and political reasons, academics often have to
undertake this type of contract work for some commercial entity. The last one I
was involved in, perhaps only one in the last decade of my working life, was an
Irish mushroom company who had used special lighting techniques in the growing
of mushrooms to boost the levels of the mushroom Vitamin D2. We
found in our human intervention studies that whereas the D2 type was
well absorbed, the active component of blood
vitamin D, did not improve; important for the company, not for us, other than a
published paper on the results[1]. However,
for a publicly funded academic to tell a small local company with a research
need to sod off and not be a nuisance will win one no favours in the university
and would be frowned upon by state agencies. But, as I say, such industry
funding is rare enough and is generally very low in the pecking order of
largely publicly funded scientists..

The
second type of industry involvement in research is as a full partner in
publicly funded research. Here in Europe, most of that international
competitive public funding is from the Commission of theEuropean Union, through its Directorate General
on Research and Innovation. It is probably the largest global funder of multi-centre
and multi-disciplinary research programmes, addressing what they regard as
‘grand societal issues”. Thus, my last EU grant was that of Food4me (www.food4me.org)
which amounted to a €12m investment in research on personalised nutrition ( a
current output of 46 peer-reviewed papers). And, as is obligatory under EU
funding, the inclusion of industrial partners within the research consortium
was 100% mandatory. These companies receive funds just as academic partners do.
In Food4Me, our biggest industrial partner was the Dutch electronics giant,
Philips, who have an interest in personalised nutrition for their smart kitchen
research. The Swiss food giant DSM was involved with a major interest in
companion diagnostic tools alongside a small University of Oslo start up, Vitas.
We had a global legal firm Heller & Heckman who worked with Swedish
academics on the legal and ethical side, we had a Belgian food business
consultancy (Biosense looking at business models) and an Irish software company, Crème Global, who wrote the software
code. These companies worked with a group of 14 academic research groups. Across most individual EU states and
definitely here in Ireland, the same rule applies: to get research income, you
musthave appropriate industrial partners.

These consortia, small or large, always enter a
legally binding agreement over the ownership of new knowledge generated in the
grant and the nature of its dissemination and use. This consortium agreement
will list every single deliverable envisaged for the project. These
deliverables include the publication of scientific papers. No company can dream
of gagging research findings that emerge from the work since that would involve
a breach of contract under Belgian law. Worse still, it would do massive
reputational damage to the company. The scientific world works in small cells
and word travels fast. The research
agreement will also allow the industrial partners to licence intellectual
property from the consortium as a whole. If they don’t use it, the intellectual
property reverts back to the project funder to dispose of, as best suits them.

The next form of industry-academia engagement
involves consultancy work where an academic, with a global reputation in his or
her research field, is engaged by a company to help them with technical issues
of both a general or specific nature. I will illustrate the issue with two
examples. In 2009, I was invited to join Google’s Food Innovation Lab
community, specifically to a small group that wanted to explore options in
personalised nutrition. I visited their headquarters in Silicon Valley,
California about 9 times over a three year period before deciding that their
interest in personalised nutrition was quite a long way from where I saw it
going. Now, neither I nor my employer, UCD, got any payment from Google: Zippo,
Nada. Apparently, I was to serve on this Google think tank because I was
privileged to be asked and should be honoured to work for nothing for the
richest company in the world! I began calling them Froogle. In contrast, I was
invited to join a top level international advisory committee for Nestlé for
which I received an honorarium. They wheeled out their different research
projects and we tore them apart. For their own good of course. So which is the
greater sin? To share my hard won expertisewith the richest company in the world for nothing or with the largest
food company running the largest food lab in the world (400 PhDs) for an
honorarium?? High priests of the Twitterati School of Scientific Morality,
please advise. On my first visit to Google, I tore strips off one group for
their sheer naivety in studying the school food programme in Mountain View Ca.
That was my job, to speak my mind. In Nestlé, I grew tired of some of
their hype about how great they were at food fortification and let them know in
no uncertain terms. They re-shaped their interest in public health nutrition,
for the better, and maybe my crankiness to senior management was a contributory
factor. In neither case would I ever dance to their tune. Nobody tells me what
to do!!

Then there is the case of acceptinga task which is not so general in nature but
has a very specific purpose and one which neatly fits into one’s research
portfolio. Thus I chair an international consortium ) (US, Canada, Denmark,
France , UK, Spain), co-funded by Cereal Partners Worldwide (Switzerland) and
General Mills (US) on breakfast in human nutrition and for this I receive a
consultancy fee. The project will lead to about 6-9 papers, individually peer
reviewed and will, for the first time, outline options for an evidence-based
approach to defining nutritional standards for breakfast, the meal everyone
agrees is of great importance (e.g. WHO. AHA, all dietetic associations, most
governments and almost all parents).

Finally, scientists are asked to sit on Boards
of non-profit organisations which are industry funded or boards which are state
funded. As regards the former, I am an unremunerated non-executive member of the Board of the European
branch of the International Life Sciences Institute (industry funded) and I have
just retired as chair of the Board of the state funded Food Safety authority of
Ireland, which carries a small remuneration.

Some scientists make the decision not to accept
the honorarium for themselves but rather to pass it on to their university and
ultimately to their research students. That doesn’t seem to matter to the high
priests of the Twitterati School of
Scientific Morality. Nor did it matter to the British Medical Journal. In 2015,
it ‘uncovered’ a network of scientists advising the UK government who had
connections with the food industry[2]. In
particular, it singled out Professor Susan Jebb from the Oxford School of
Public Health, who at the time of the alleged naughty industrial collusion was
at the MRC’s (Medical Research Council) Nutrition Lab in Cambridge. Jebb
pointed out that all of this work followed the MRC protocol for external
funding, that the contribution of industry was made public in the relevant
scientific papers, that she personally received no money from industry and that
all this pre-dated her taking on the chair of a very important UK advisory
committee on strategies to reduce obesity[3]. A
phone call from the BMJ would have revealed such but why let the truth get in
the way of a good story.In this
business, we get used to the constant harassment on industry funding. Here in
Ireland, the law requires all academics to complete an annual Declaration of
Interest under the Ethics in Public Office Act 1995[4].

Of late. There is growing interest in seeking
declarations of interest which do not involve industry or financial
remuneration[5]. Let’s
imagine that some appropriate state agency is asked to review the evidence that
veganism is perfectly compatible with optimal nutrition in adolescents. Would
you be impressed if the chair was a vegan? Would you be happy for someone to be
a member of the committee if they had an adolescent child who was a practicing
vegan. And what about someone who has
written several popular books which argue some issue or other. Are they capable
of being independent thinkers?

Transparency is the key to ensuring honesty and
integrity in all aspects of scientific evaluation. And all interests must be
made transparent whether they involve industry or anything else that might be
seen by the outside world to shape world views.

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"Ever seen a fat fox ~ Human obesity explored"

About Me

I graduated from University College Dublin in 1971 with an Masters in Agricultural Chemistry, took a PhD at Sydney University in 1976 and joined the University of Southampton Medical School as a lecturer in human nutrition in 1977. In 1984 I returned to Ireland to take up a post at the Department of Clinical Medicine Trinity College Dublin and was appointed as professor of human nutrition. In 2006 I left Trinity and moved to University College Dublin as Director of the UCD Institute of Food and Health. I am a former President of the Nutrition Society and I've served on several EU and UN committees on nutrition and Health. I have published over 350+ peer reviewed scientific papers in Public Health Nutrition and Molecular Nutrition and am principal investigator on several national and EU projects (www.ucd.ie/jingo; www.food4me.org). My popular books are "Something to chew on ~ challenging controversies in human nutrition" and "Ever seen a fat fox: human obesity explored"